These two Letters to the Editor were sent to Newsday following their cartoon on Feb. 6.
I was troubled by Matt Bodkin’s Feb. 6 editorial cartoon, which depicts a teacher saying to parent activists,”They’ve put off linking student tests to our evaluations. You’re on your own.”
I support any parent who chooses to opt a child out of the abusive state tests, regardless of the connection to high-stakes consequences. The cartoon misrepresents the feelings of many teachers on Long Island about these assesments and demonstrates disrespect for our profession. – Ron Verderber, East Meadow Editor’s Note: The writer is a teacher and President of the Jericho Teachers Association.
Matt Bodkin’s cartoon on Saturday, February 6, 2016 lacked good taste. Yes it’s a victory for teachers to have their evaluations no longer linked to ill-rushed high stakes testing, but that does not mean that teachers will abandon the grassroots parent driven opt-out movement. To even suggest that proves the cartoonist is bias and may be bitter toward educators. Who knows maybe his art teacher said he would never amount to anything. Teachers are constantly behind causes that have come and go over the years like fair funding for public education, smaller classrooms, safer schools, healthy lunches, tolerance towards diversity, etc. Just because an issue is met by some form of progress, doesn’t mean that educators will abandon that cause outright. In fact, I’ve never known any teacher or public education advocate to be one dimensional in their approach to improve the lives of their students – I guess that one dimensional narrow-minded way of thinking we leave up to newspaper editorial pages.-Kris LaGrange, UCOMM Communications
